CALLING ALL STARBUCKS! —————— by Steve Nadis
So far he has visited nearly 5,000 stores owned by Starbucks out of a total of 6,055 such establishments, not counting licensed franchises in airports, grocery stores, and the like. The hard part is keeping pace: Starbucks plans to add 1,000 new stores in 2006, which means Winter may be on a treadmill for the rest of his life, never quite achieving his goal.
Well if it’s any comfort to him, Winter doesn’t have to worry about any competition from me. I have not had a single cup of coffee in my life, nor am I any fan of Starbucks. The most interesting thing about this whole quest, if you ask me, is that Winter doesn’t even like Starbucks. So why does he do it? You might say “because it’s there,” but unlike climbing Mt. Everest, he says, this is something no one else has done. Or tried. Or thought of doing, for that matter. Until an ambitious software developer from Houston came along with a singular dream…
I remember my one and only visit to a Starbucks. The coffee S.U.C.K.E.D!! Even though it cost over $3, I threw it out.
But since then I stumbled upon their DoubleShots. Yummy! I would never go to a Starbucks again, but I do buy these little cans of goodness from my local convenience stores all the time now.
Hi Sylvana — thanks for the note. The fact that you’ve only been to one Starbucks is impressive in this day and age, especially for a coffee drinker. It would seem hard to avoid. I don’t know the product to which you refer but I shall keep my eyes open.
Starbucks is the only (and I stress only) coffee shop in Athens that does NOT allow indoor smoking. So when we (my daughters and I) head out for an all day window-shopping, book-fair rummaging city excursion we need a pit stop. We need a SMOKELESS, air-conditioned pit stop. My kids get a milkshake and I get a laugh out of those coffee names: grande decaf mocaccino latte (huh???)
Btw, is Winter planning on going international with this? Because there’s a whole lotta of Starbucks out there, strewn all over the planet!
ZARDOZ SAYS:
Its hard to believe that
you’never , drank coffee
i havent tried out
everything in my life
i’ve come across ,
but seriously coffee..??
——————zardoz
It’s true Z, I’ve never had coffee. Hello FW, if I were in your shoes, I’d pick the smoke-free establishment too. I have nothing against Starbucks in particular. But it doesn’t have much to offer a non-coffee drinker like myself…
It’s a sorry state of affairs when this passed for news in the Boston Globe. BTW, when you said "ambitious software developer from Houston," didn’t you mean to say "loser from Houston?"
Hi TB — Thanks for the note. I hadn’t revealed my sources but now that it’s out there, I admit that the Globe did leak the story to me. When I said ambitious I didn’t mean he was necessarily ambitious in terms of software development–only that he had picked an extremely difficult (and arguably worthless) goal. Does that make him a loser? I suppose it depends on how you look at it. I personally have set an equally difficult goal: never to set foot in a Starbucks.
I’d say this kind of story is par for the course at The Globe. And the nice thing is, if you missed it in the paper, you can still hear the same story on NPR, or CNN, or any other news source in America.
Ah, the wonders of canned, low-fiber, pre-sweetened and thoroughly homogenized news!
OK, so it’s a stupid story. Yet somehow in all its ridiculousness, it does get people’s attention.
can i make friend with you??